Holding a mirror to the world

From Kavanagh country to a TV career, comedian Oliver Callan has found satire to be anything but stoney ground, writes Richard Fitzpatrick.

OLIVER CALLAN grew up on a farm in Patrick Kavanagh country in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan. It was partly from summer holidays spent on his grandmother’s farm in Inch just outside Killeagh, Co Cork, however, that he got the bug for news and political satire. Mary ‘Molly’ Walsh was an insatiable newshound.

“She was a news fanatic,” he says. “She used to buy every local newspaper going from the bread van – The Killeagh People, which is gone; obviously, the Examiner. Even over as far as Waterford, she’d get the Dungarvan Observer. There were four breakfasts served up on the breakfast table every morning, somebody different — attending horses, cattle, sheep, holidaymakers and so on — was always coming in.